Obama dips, but still has comfortable lead

Thursday

Oct 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMOct 30, 2008 at 12:22 PM

Democrat Barack Obama's margin has slipped by 5 points in the past week, a new Quinnipiac Poll of Ohio voters shows. However, the Illinois Democrat still holds a 9-point lead, meaning Republican John McCain's surge could be too little too late.

Democrat Barack Obama's margin has slipped by 5 points in the past week, a new Quinnipiac Poll of Ohio voters shows. However, the Illinois Democrat still holds a 9-point lead, meaning Republican John McCain's surge could be too little too late.

Obama continues to hold a 12-point advantage in Pennsylvania, the one must-win blue state for McCain. But the race has tightened to a 2-point Obama edge in Florida, making that state too close to call in the Connecticut university's survey.

The three swing states are being polled regularly because no candidate has become president since 1960 without winning at least two of the three.

"If -- IF -- Sen. Barack Obama can take Florida, he could match or come close to President Bill Clinton's re-election margin in 1996, carrying all three of the big swing states en route to rolling up 379 Electoral College votes," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in a release. "The last challenger to win the Big Three was Ronald Reagan, who tallied 489 Electoral College votes in his 1980 landslide."

The poll's 9-point Obama lead in Ohio matches the results of a survey released earlier this week by the Los Angeles Times /Bloomberg News. Other recent surveys put Obama's margin from 3 to 7 points in the Buckeye State. No current major survey shows McCain ahead.

A key to the drop in Quinnipiac's numbers: Yesterday's poll contained 5 percent more Democrats than Republicans; last week's had 13 percent more. Most surveys this year show that Democrats will outnumber Republicans at the polls.

Ohio's new early-voting setup is proving a boon to Obama; he is up 57 percent to 31 percent in the Quinnipiac Poll among those who already have cast a ballot. The Democrat continues his dominance among young, female and black voters, and leads with independents by 12. He trails McCain by just a single point among whites and by 3 points with male voters.

"The Obama campaign has worried for months about winning Ohio's white working-class voters, including those who had been with Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary. Obama's ability to be competitive with that group is why he is ahead. He's only losing one in five Clinton voters and is within 2 points of Sen. McCain among whites without college degrees. That's a recipe for Obama success," Brown said.